Educational screen & audio-visual guide (c1956-1971])

The Second Year a Decisive Decade SIXTY-TWO SKIDOO! By Henry C. Ruark, Jr. Cotisultant On Instructional Materials Oregon State Department of Education Henry Ruark, in this exclusive survey of audiovisual happenings in 1962, describes how the strong main current of audiovisual purpose which began an optimistic decade has been diverted in a variety of directions. A HERE is a queer somewhat ominous "sense of waiting and watching" abroad in the AV instructional materials world as the end of 1962 approaches. And there is something about this Second Year of the Decisive Decade, reminiscent of the ebullient and youthful spirit of the Middle 1920s, with its offhand greeting of 23-Skidoo and its sophomoric feeling of nearing maturity. For those twenty persons chosen for demonstrated AV leadership who pondered over the second annual Educational Screen Year-End Survey, there are more problems and more potentials to be wondered about than progress to report. Conducted of necessity early in October, the Survey represents something less than the complete Second Year record; consensus on emerging trends and on the significance of events is much less clear this year. But there is no question about the continuance of the massive movement toward integration described last year; nearly every survey response throws both direct and incidental light on many events and actions of 1962 furthering this trend. But last year's sense of purposeful direction, of surging progress but manageable momentum, of inevitable forward movement, is not so strongly apparent. In its place, there seems to be a growing diversity of direction, a somewhat random routing of several main streams of activity and emphasis. Many sub-trends showed significant blending last year; in 1962, some promised to become more than just tributary streams. Last year, "galloping integration" was the major theme of continuity and even of concentration; this year a beginning divergence can be detected for the "Systems Approach". Meanwhile, "back at the schoolhouse," the integrationists and the teachers are hard at work in their continuous in-service meeting, building minor miracles of AV logistics to meet the evergrowing demands, fighting liard to maintain a status quo already threatened by greater num bers of hungry media-materials customers. While "Programed Learning" last year deserved the designation "Under Test-Use With Caution," this year the stream of "programed instniotion" requires a most agile-footed devotee to skip nimbly from newly-floated machine to still-floating (although somewhat waterlogged) complete course books, to nonchalantly-bobbing bits and pieces ("unitized materials") . . . and perhaps thus reach a beachhead on the other shore, somewhere. Educational Television is now a full-fledged river ("from Dullsville at the start to Robertsville at the mouth") with the majority of the flo(Klwaters coming from the impact of the pent-up product of ten years and $72 million in foundation funds, now to be bolstered by U. S. government grants of another $32 million. What about the teacher and the AV-Man? Last year "the AV Specialist" was seen as "a chief catalyst for change"; this year "the Instructional Media Speciahst" is becoming recognized as "one leader in a broadlyconceived teaching team"; as "a mediator of learning experiences," skillfully guiding the teacher's hand and thus helping to weave the warp and woof of instructional materials into the colorful fabric of education; and as "the pandemic individual"— he who gets the general drift of frontier ideas and translates and mediates them for practical communications purposes. The pandemic AV-Man must be what was once called "the generalizing specialist or the specializing generalist"— a strange breed, indeed, but not so strange as some of the broadening areas of concern that he finds himself and his profession being pressed into probing and pioneering. The teacher, ever sensitive to pressures for change in the classroom, now seems to feel less threat from the advancing monsters of technology, rather, a beginning confidence that these are tools of major importance, from which she can derive great personal and professional advantage, given help in understanding 706 Educational Screen and Audiovisual Guide — December, 1962